


name like lying, name like prayer

by midnightluck



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Dad W. D. Gaster, Gaster totally slept through astratemporal cartography, Gen, Pseudoscience, and his A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 22:06:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6925204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightluck/pseuds/midnightluck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. WingDing Gaster, Royal Scientist, is tall and thin and imposing, and his face is fixed into a creepy grin for the most part. His voice is a weird double-layer of broken and comprehensible, and he has this awful tendency to actually focus on whomever is speaking to him. </p><p>He also makes really awful puns, has two kids he will brag about at the drop of a hat, tends to sing nonsense songs while working, is far too in love with far too volatile compounds, and doesn’t hold with silly limits like gravity or time.</p><p>the happy-go-lucky dadster au with far too many science jokes</p>
            </blockquote>





	name like lying, name like prayer

**Author's Note:**

> The dictionary defines "wingding" as "a noisy, exciting celebration or party" so here's blackberry Wingding being great at science and bad at people and having a really pretty great life.

“Hey, hey, Berret, hey,” WingDing says, “I brought you coffee!”

Berret says, “oh god,” and also, “please no,” and tries to sink into her chair. It’s not her most effective strategy ever.

WingDing makes his equivalent of a pout, and it’s vaguely terrifying. “That’s not faaaaiiiir,” he whines. “I go out of my way to bring all my cute new assistants coffee because I am the best boss ever and they greet me with fear and terror,” he bemoans. “This is what I get for being nice!”

Berret eyes him warily, guilt mixing with survival instincts. WingDing sees the hesitation and holds out the coffee.

“...why is it in a chemical flask?” she asks slowly.

WingDing swirls the flask around and beams. “Keeps it warmer!”

Berret doubts it. Very much. In fact, “That’s the kind of flask we keep chemical catalysts in.”

“I totally washed it, there’s nothing but coffee in here! Promise!”

She’s not sure coffee is quite supposed to be that color. “Y’know, I’m not quite thirsty after all.”

WingDing sighs at her with his whole body, shrinking whole inches as he slouches. “You’re such a spoilsport,” he accuses.

“And you’re a madman,” she yells at him, and he shrugs and slouches off to find someone else to offer coffee to.

There’s no one in the hall, and no one in lab one, and he ends up back in his office and giving up on sharing the coffee with anyone. Besides, it’s cold now.

There’s not much paperwork today and he finishes what is there relatively quickly. Maybe he’ll go play in the Memorarium for a while? He grabs a puzzle cube off his desk as he goes, and clicks the rows around and quietly sings a list of chemical names in his undervoice as he walks.

“Hey, Doc, that you? Come check this out,” Campbell’s voice calls, and WingDing meanders his way down that hall. “Hey, look, we found some really weird--what’s that?”

“Puzzle cube,” he answers absently. “Gotta match up all the colors on their sides.” He squints down at the cube, which has a mess of colors every-which-where. “...I’m not good at it,” he confesses mournfully, shoulders falling.

“My kid’s got one of those,” Naira says. “They said there’s some algorithmic sequences you can use to always solve it, but I never could get it either.”

WingDing grins, throwing up his hands in joy and accidentally tossing the cube away. “Oh, good! I thought it was just me being super dumb or something, ‘cause my youngest solves it in a few minutes every time.”

Campbell’s jaw drops. “No way,” he says, “that’s no fair!”

“I guess genius breeds true,” Naira says, grinning. “And speaking of cool smart things, seriously, look at this!”

“Right, right, working time,” WingDing says, inching in behind them and bending to get a better look. “Astratemporal cartography, right?”

“Yeah, and look here, see? It’s like there’s a weak point just here. Now on its own, that’s not so unusual; maybe it’s just a human doing its thing or any number of small temporal distortions, right? But there’s one here, too. And here, and here, and here. So we connected them, tried to follow the chronological line, see, and--”

“--and at first it made no sense, but we hadn’t accounted for fixed points, so then we remapped and--”

“--doesn’t it kinda look like, well, a path?”

WingDing squints at it. No, it really doesn’t. It looks like a wiggly line across the surface of cooled lava, is what it looks like. He nods and makes a generic humming noise, and they thankfully take that as their cue to continue.

“It’s not natural, well, at least, like, it’s not the standard phototemporic current, see? It’s--”

“--running widdershins against the quantum entanglement principle--”

“--nonstandard deviation, more like a secondary transversal, only deeper--”

“Okay, hang on, breathe!” WingDing commands, hands flying up. “Pretend I’m actual shit at astratemporal cartography and slept through most of that class, okay? Hypothetically, I mean. I didn’t really, just--nevermind. So we’ve got a tiny path off of the highway of time, and it’s been used so much it’s turned into an actual viable path of its own? Is that what I got?”

Campbell shrugs, and the two trade glances. “Well, yes,” he says. “I mean, it’s not really like that at all, but that’s a general summary, sure.”

“If you’re gonna be _boring_ about it,” Naira pouts, and WingDing ignores her magnificently.

“So where does this trail lead, then?” he asks, still focused on the wiggly line on the screen. If he pretends it’s a map and the mountain-y parts are fixed points and that crevice there is the main timeline, then yeah, the wiggly line makes a bit more sense. Only, “It’s going back into the original?”

“Yes!” Campbell says, rocketing to his feet. “That’s what’s so interesting! It’s a closed loop between two points!”

WingDing squints at it some more. “It’s...a path back in time?” he hazards.

“Well, yeah, but look, see?” Naira says, tracing the curve of the crevice, the original timeline. “See here, where it cuts across? It’s actually about eighteen parsecs shorter than the original. It’s not just a path back in time, it’s a shortcut!”

“A shortcut back in time,” WingDing repeats, rolling the idea around. “That’s...that is so cool.”

“Right?!?”

“But the amount of power it would take to create something like that is incredible,” Naira says. “We’re talking soul-levels of power. Someone would have to be really determined to make even the one trip.”

“Of course, later trips would be easier and easier, the more often it happened. Once the trail is established, traveling along it is easier.”

“Okay,” WingDing says, and taps the first point along the timeline that the shortcut hits. “And when is this? Do we know?”

“Eh, no, not yet.”

“We could probably figure it out, down to a two month window, if we had time, but it could be entirely in the past. It could be in the future, or we could be in it right now! And even if we did figure out the when, we still probably couldn’t use it ourselves.”

“Cause it’s outside the timeline, see? That means someone made it on purpose, with their own magic and will, so it’s kinda tied to them. Only soul-level magic can use soul-level magic paths, as it were.”

WingDing's looking at the map again, and if they can’t use that path… “Can we make our own? Or travel inside the current?”

“Nope and no,” Campbell answers, popping the p just to be extra obnoxious. “I mean, maybe we could make our own if we could use the human souls, but otherwise….”

“And the current’s called a current for a reason; going against it? Not really a possibility.”

“But.” and WingDing's looking at this, but it’s too flat. Forward and backward and loop-de-loop aren’t the only directions, after all. “Could we...shift laterally?”

Campbell and Naira stare at him.

“No, but listen. If someone can forge a shortcut outside the timestream, why can’t we make one inside it? Not against the current, just, y’know. Step out here and in there, maybe a second later. Use monster-level magic to make shortcuts wherever.”

Campbell’s large mouth is hung open, and Naira’s head bobbles back and forth. WingDing stares back at them, twitching and tapping his fingers, but not blinking. Just waiting.

“That’s insane,” Campbell finally states. “That’s--that’s batshit bonkers.”

“It could not possibly work,” Naira agrees.

The look WingDing gives them in not very impressed. “In this lab we--”

“Don’t hold with the impossible,” they chorus with him. Then Naira says, “But this is--I mean, the logistics of the physical movement alone--”

“No, wait,” Campbell cuts in, “The physical aspect would be no problem, what are you talking about, there’s just no way to establish position markers along a constant flow like the current--”

“Oh, no, that’s doable, you’d just need beacons, I’m thinking, that work in four dimensions, but the resonance--”

“--no way, wait, could we _use the resonance_ as a tag…?”

WingDing grins. Now _that_ is more like it.

He leaves them to it and spends a half hour looking for the puzzle cube he dropped. It’s definitely around somewhere, he knows, and he’d really like it back because it keeps his fingers busy and reminds him of his youngest, who is the most precious creature known to monsterkind.

And then he has to go finish up the report he’s compiling, leaving a space for this awesome new lateral-shift project. He writes himself a note to bother them for a report at the end of the week, and puts the note on the bulletin board. Then he spends a minute staring at the massive amount of paper already on the board, and writes himself another note about cleaning it out. He can’t find a place to put that note.

But he does find a page with birthdays, and tomorrow is Alphys’ birthday! She’s not even in his personal unit, but he tracks every one of his employee’s birthdays and remembers their family’s names and is just generally a wonderful boss.

Case in point: while they generally do a big thing, he recalls Alphys as being a bit shy, and she probably won’t want a massive party. So he calls up a restaurant he’s heard her talk about a few times, wondering about catering.

The phone clicks a connection, and there’s a rustle on the other side. “Hello?” he asks, a bit hesitant. “Is this Grillby’s?”

There’s a rustle-click-tap-tap-tap, and oh, it’s like that. He drops into hands easy as breathing, because language doesn’t matter so much for the undervoice. He asks about lunch for the whole lab for tomorrow and they quickly reach an agreement.

And then it’s time for the final rounds before the end of the day. He wanders by the exit with a bag of chisps he’s pretending to eat from, offering them as a conversation starter and making sure everyone is happy and no one needs anything.

After he properly disposes of the chisps in the hazardous waste bin, he swings back through the lab to lock up, check everything, and grab his bag before he heads home to where his two perfect adorable hellions are waiting for him.

The walk is quick but the light’s already fading by the time he gets in. As always, he slams open the front door and carols out, “Daddy’s home!”

Papyrus, his precious perfect little cinnamon bunny of a skelechild, makes victory babble noises at him and immediately crawls over to be picked up. Sans is probably in the kitchen, because that’s the direction the massive, world-weary sigh comes from.

WingDing hoists Papy up and twirls around in circles, making vroom-vroom flying noises. When Sans shows up in the doorway, he plops Papyrus down on top of Sans’ head and grabs the adorably tiny bone hands. “What do we want for dinner?” he croons to the two of them, waving Papyrus’ hands around.

Sans sighs longsufferingly, but puts up a hand to support Papyrus on top of his skull because he is an amazing kid who looooooves his brother.

"Saaaaaaaans, I want pizza for dinner. Paps, you too? Hey, yes, pizza for dinner, let's have pizza, yay! Do we have stuff to make pizza?"

WingDing is pretty sure the eyeroll is not entirely necessary.  "Do we--yes, I got it last time you did this. Yes, we can do pizza."

"Yay!” He scoops up Papyrus again and goes twirling away into the kitchen. “Y'hear that, tiny Papaya? Pizza, pizza!"

"No, you both out, not happening, I like this house standing and unburnt so get out of the kitchen!" Sans yells, slipping around them to guard the cooking area until WingDing pouts at him.

"Aw, Paaaaap, your brother is being mean to us! Yeah, exactly, here, I'll stick out my tongue too. Nyeeeeeeeeh! Can you do that yet? C'mon, go nyeeeeeeh."

"Oh my god, just get out and let me make pizza in peace."

“I feel like the dynamic of this family is not really right,” WingDing reflects out loud to himself, but then wonderful tiny Papyrus actually does manage to go something very similar to ‘nyeeeeeeeeeee’, waving his little fists around in excitement.

He doesn’t realize the ‘awwwww’ is in surround sound until Sans is there, heart in his eyes, catching Papyrus’ tiny hands. They share a moment of pure pleasure in Papyrus’ first amazingly cute taunt before Sans bonks his brother on the head in a skeleton kiss. Then he shoves his brother into WingDing’s arms, turns his dad around, and physically pushes them both out the door.

WingDing doesn’t dig in his heels, but he doesn’t help either, and continues making vroom-vroom flying noises for Papyrus. When Sans finally gets them over the threshold, he points at them and says, “Stop teaching my brother bad habits. And also stay out!”

WingDing laughs at the first and respects the second. For now.

He stays out all the way up until there’s stuff to munch on, and then he and Papyrus make a sneaky ninja raid and Sans pretends to be upset at them, but he doesn’t use magic and he’s still smiling so he can’t possibly be as annoyed as he says he is.

“You are the absolute worst and everything about you is the worst thing about you and I only put up with you for the sake of Papyrus,” Sans informs him once the door of the oven is closed.

WingDing beams and scoops Sans up, bonking his head. “You’re becoming such a good liar!” he praises, and spins Sans in a circle, too. Sans is too old for vroom-vroom flying noises, though. “I almost even believed that!”

“Why?” Sans laments, but he bonks back. “Geeze, let me down, I gotta start cleaning up.”

He grins at his child and does put him down, but sweeps him into a hug to stop him from the horrible fate of being productive. “Love you,” he whispers, and Sans gives a quiet sigh and stops struggling.

Then, “Hey,” he whispers, and Sans’ shoulders slump. Yeah, WingDing grins, he knows what’s coming. “Hey, Sansy, what’s the matter?”

“You are the worst,” Sans says, but he isn’t fighting to escape the hug. “The absolute worst.”

“But what’s the matter?”

“I hate you and everything you stand for, forever and ever.”

“Yeah, but what’s the matter?”

And Sans blows out his breath like this physically hurts him, then makes half-assed jazz hands as he says flatly, “Everything’s matter.”

WingDing almost laughs himself sick, just like he has every time Sans does it. Sans takes advantage of his moment of weakness to break his hold and get to the counter when Papyrus is sitting.

“You respect me, right?” he can hear Sans asking his little brother. “You’re going to grow up sane and well-adjusted and love me like a normal skeleton, right?”

Papyrus tries to stand, manages it by catching his brother’s eye socket, and then tries to bonk Sans’ face with his entire skull. He catches Sans in the very delicate and sensitive nose hole, and Sans tries very hard to not actually cry or yell at his brother.

Sans eventually reaches out to pat his brother’s skull in thanks, and due to teared-up eyes, he misses. WingDing actually collapses to the kitchen floor with laughter.

Papyrus makes happy giggly noises and Sans is muttering some really dire words that WingDing hadn’t known he knew, and over the sound of all that plus laughter, the timer dings.

“You don’t deserve my pizza,” Sans informs them haughtily, but it’s entirely ruined by the hand still cupped over his nose area and the way his voice comes out rough and mostly in hands.

“Love you!” WingDing chortles back also in hands, and manages to pull himself along the floor to the counter. He heaves himself upright and starts to set the table because he’s a horrible parent, yeah, but he’s not a useless monster.

The pizza is wonderful, of course, because Sans is really good at simple meals. Occasionally WingDing feels like shit because his son is a better cook and more responsible monster than he is, but his sons are both full of light and life and laughter, so he can't be doing entirely badly.

Sans takes Papyrus upstairs after dinner, because there is more dinner on Papyrus’ face than inside it. WingDing cleans up the kitchen because that’s only fair, right?

And then he goes upstairs for their nightly ritual of him standing in the bathroom and lecturing them about why they need to brush their teeth but not the rest of their bones and the science behind the magic behind skeletons, as Sans ignores him beautifully and Papyrus plays in the sink.

He tucks them both in, bonks them gently, and wishes them good night and dreams full of happy and wonder. Sans grumbles as always, and WingDing teases him about how a babybones with an eternal smile could ever be so grumpy.

“Because I’m related to you,” Sans tells him, and WingDing can’t help but beam and go back and bonk him again.

Then he takes care of his own nighttime ritual and grabs his notebook and goes to sit outside Sans’ door for the next hour or so.

It’s early tonight, when the ragged breathing starts and the magic behind Sans’ heartbeat shifts and swells. WingDing sighs and sets his notebook aside.

Just like every night, Sans is tossing and trapped in his sheets when WingDing creeps in. It’s a pathetic sight, and it hurts something inside him a little deeper every time he sees it.

“Sans? Hey, Sans, wake up,” but Sans won’t, not from that. So WingDing just scoops him up, right into his arms, letting his child’s head rest on his shoulder and rubbing the tips of his fingerbones over the boy’s spine. “Sansy-pansy, hey, s’okay, it’s all okay,” he whispers, and hums.

Sans never wakes with yells anymore--he stopped doing that as soon as he realized it could wake his brother. Now he’s quiet when he wakes, but his breath hitches and his tiny fingers curl into WingDing’s soft sweater and he tucks his head down to hide.

WingDing hates that this is a thing his child is used to, but he still doesn’t know what’s causing the constant night terrors. Right now all he can do is rock Sans, swaying around in a gentle rhythm and still humming. It’s mostly his undervoice and sounds like static, but Sans has always found handtalk soothing anyway.

It’s the tune of his mother’s lullaby, with words he made up to fit because he can’t remember hers. He may be a bad parent, but he comes by it honestly, and he’s really trying. It’s just nights like this that he feels so useless.

Especially when Sans is already regulating his own breathing, is uncurling his fingers, is wiggling to be put down. His child is so independent so young, and he goes down on his knees in front of him.

“Sans?” he asks softly, still mostly in hands. He shakes the cuff of his sweater over his hand and uses it to wipe under Sans’ eyes. “Everything’s okay,” he says softly, and waits.

His head still down, Sans mutters something that he has to lean into hear. “...s’a’matter?” he catches, but that’s enough.

“Everything,” he says, drumming his fingers on the top of his kid’s skull. “Everything’s matter!”

His child takes a deep breath, and by the time he looks up he’s done crying. His chest falls evenly on every breath, and it steals WingDing’s breath right away; his child is so so brave. “I know,” Sans says, and his voice is mostly steady. “Everything’s okay,” he repeats, and, “everyone’s safe, nothing’s wrong, and everything’s okay.”

And then he breathes out, and he looks up and says, “Geeze, stop worrying, haven’t you heard? Everything’s fine!” and he wanders off back to his bed and WingDing cannot _even_ with this child.

Finally he goes to bed himself because Sans will be fine for the rest of the night, and that is, more or less, a typical day in the life of Dr. WingDing Gaster.

**Author's Note:**

> Supposed to have five chapters or so, but I'm really bad at finishing things and this stands...decently alone. Except for Sans being all small-child-y, I mean. And the complete lack of actual plot.


End file.
